I am an unequivocal enemy of all kinds of “sex education” in public schools. From the beginning, the only goals and the only effects of these programs has been to corrupt children and to undermine parental authority. Sex education cuts off the conjugal act from the social and moral contexts that make it meaningful: the institution of marriage, the links between generations, the western tradition of romance, the ideals of chastity, modesty, and faithfulness. What’s left is a mere animal act, a purely hygenic concern. To teach children to think this way is to degrade them, to desensitize and dull them, to rob them of the depth of human experience.

Induction into these mysteries of life is the duty of the parents–ideally of the parent of the child’s sex, since it’s from the father that a boy should and generally does get his ideas of manhood, and from the mother that a girl should and generally does get her ideas of womanhood. Within the family, there can obviously be no separation between sex and the rest of life. In this setting, its place and purpose are manifest.

Of course, if my child was going to be subjected to public sex education, I would at least want it to avoid encouraging vices like fornication, contraception, and onanism. Thus came the compromise of “abstinence education”. This is a terrible name; it’s not abstinence we want our children to learn, but chastity. A person may abstain from sex for any number of reasons: principle, lack of opportunity, squeamishness, a desire to be unencumbered. An abstinent man may have no more moral sense than a lecher. A chaste man avoids sex until marriage because he respects the awesome significance of the act. He appreciates masculinity, femininity, and marriage on a level to which the unchaste man is insensible.

Liberals hate abstinence education. For them, the whole goal of sex education is to “demystify”, that is, to strip sex of any higher meaning. “Sex is no different from a handshake, and marriage is no different from having a roommate”–that’s the “scientific” view. The liberal worries that “teaching abstinence” means sneaking back in those “unscientific” aspects that humanize and dignify the act. “Abstinence teaching doesn’t work”, they say; in doing so, they show that they don’t understand what the goal of a real chastity education would be. If the goal were abstinence, then it would not be education but conditioning. The goal would be not to create understanding, but to influence behavior. Then one could judge an exhortation to chastity by how often it “worked”, i.e. how often students delayed intercourse. But if the goal is to introduce students to the social and spiritual significance of man, woman, and sex, then a student may be weak and fall while still living in a more elevated moral universe. The guilt he feels afterwards shows that he has been given a higher consciousness than the brute who copulates without thought. It’s the viewpoint, rather than the behavior, that’s the key point, and the liberals know it. They often boast that their sex education frees students of guilt and shame. They would count it a victory if one of their students engaged in condomless sex, so long as the student was confident that the act was meaningless.

After that prologue, you should have no trouble understanding how it is that the liberal media have now found an abstinence program which they can approve. Get Religion quotes from the AP article:

An experimental abstinence-only program without a moralistic tone can delay teens from having sex, a provocative study found.

Billed as the first rigorous research to show long-term success with an abstinence-only approach, the study differed from traditional programs that have lost federal and state support in recent years. The classes didn’t preach saving sex until marriage or disparage condom use.

Instead, it involved assignments to help sixth- and seventh graders see the drawbacks to sexual activity at their age, including having them list the pros and cons themselves. Their cons far outnumbered the pros.

You see, it’s okay to tell kids not to have sex just as long as you don’t question that sex is meaningless and fornication is totally okay. Abstinence can be reduced to a technique for acheiving one’s personal ends, just like sex has been reduced. If a girl decides to remain a virgin because promiscuity could complicate her career plans, that’s okay (maybe even smart). If she thinks she has a duty to abstain, because to do otherwise would be to betray her future husband, then we obviously have someone in need of further demystification. Any choice is acceptable, as long as it’s selfish.

From the point of view of chastity, an abstinence education like this is only one step better than the condom-worshipping promiscuity education the liberals favor. Once again, why must we allow the schools to stick their noses in these matters anyway?